


Skinned Hare

by annhellsing



Category: The Witcher (TV)
Genre: AU Where He Doesn't Die, Ambiguous Supernatural References, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blood and Injury, Canon Typical Violence, Established Relationship, F/M, Implied/Referenced Torture, Injury Recovery, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Secret Relationship, Starvation, suicide ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-09
Updated: 2020-01-09
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:22:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22179265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/annhellsing/pseuds/annhellsing
Summary: In which Mousesack's burial was premature.
Relationships: Ermion | Mousesack/Reader
Comments: 8
Kudos: 54





	1. Many Ways

**Author's Note:**

> when i love a character, i resurrect them with the power of love!!! maybe not in the first chapter but?? eventually. yeah, i just kinda Needed to give him a nice gf and make everything okay. hope you like it?

He’s been forced to contemplate all possible meanings of the word escape. He can’t push his hands very far under his doublet, but his middle and index finger feel the fringe on the end of the queen’s velvet sash. 

It’s an option, he reminds himself through the nauseating disgust with the idea. He’s starved for options, and for other things. If they meant to keep him alive very long, they would have fed him by now. Whatever’s intended for will be brief and devastating, most likely for the princess. 

His stomach rolls with the cell as it takes a sharp turn around a corner. But he keeps his fingers pressed to the ends of the sash. Just because he can.

“You might live, you know?” there’s a voice beside him. He’s taken to closing his eyes, though there is no difference in what he sees.

But Mousesack opens them, slowly, and in the windowless box he sees you. You fit, snugly, in the sliver of space next to him. You lie on your side, as he does with your back to the wall. 

He can’t see most of you, only your face is visible under a very dark cloak pulled tight under your chin. But your hair is loose, falling into your eyes though you make no move to right it. You only stare at him, at nowhere but his eyes. 

“Are you dead?” he breaches a vulgar topic in the space of a few, frightened breaths. It’s the first thing he says to you. He has to know. 

“It’s cold in here,” you say like that’s an answer, “are your shoulders hurting?” 

The pain grew tiresome after a while. Though the walking was better than being carted around with no way of knowing whether it was day or night. He does not miss the feeling of his joints in winter, of the way they could grind together like bits of glass were stuck between them.

“I can’t feel them,” he says, “or my legs and fingers, which might be a good thing.”

He assumes you’re dead, ghosts can be rather evasive about their nature. But your blank stare shifts to loving, indulgent compassion without a second thought. If you are gone, what’s left behind is your sweetness. 

A hand emerges from the dark folds of your cloak. Mousesack could swear you did not have arms the moment before your knuckles press against his cheek, that they appear out of thin air only when he has need. And he does, though he did not realize it. 

For all the freezing wind that slips through the cracks in the cell, your hand is quite warm. You put your other palm to his freezing forehead, as if worried he might be ill. It feels familiar, though still unsafe. Touching him like this would’ve been done quickly, but you let your hands linger over him like you’ve decided that brevity is a curse.

He doesn’t have the energy to lean against you. His neck still aches, your hand leaves his forehead and cups the side of his face so that it doesn’t press against the wood. It makes him sigh, he can’t hold it in. It does help.

Your thumb brushes his earlobe. He wants you to run your fingers through his hair how you did at the castle, on the night of the first snowstorm last winter. But he doesn’t want to speak. He doesn’t want to spoil this in case you disappear. 

“Poor darling,” you say, “your skin is like ice. But you don’t have a fever, at least.” 

The urge to shrug away your concern presses against him as much as you do. But he can’t bring himself to tell you it isn’t the cold that’s making him sick.

The metal at his wrists, the bolts that surround him make him feel like half of him is missing. Magic, it’s beautiful hum has surrounded his head, pressed against the hollows of his eyelids ever since he was a child. And it’s gone. His skull feels empty, his bones are void. What makes him up has left. 

He lowers his fingers away from the sash, reaching out as best he can. His sleeves cover the worst of the effect of the metal against his skin, the bulging veins of his wrists rebelling against the unnatural material. Mousesack is glad of it, he wouldn’t want to worry you more than you are. He does loathe that lovesick, saddened expression of yours. 

He feels for the fabric that should cover you, but his hands only slip into a hazy darkness. But he isn’t allowed to contemplate the horror of that, you call his eyes back to your own.

“I am dead,” you tell him. And despite his acceptance, the blow still hits. It sends a fresh wave of ideas, of pictures into his head void of all magic. It hurts, you having died. And most likely alone.

The kitchen maids were not given poison. They were left to run and fend for themselves, with no towers to jump from or hope in the least. He did think of you as he led the princess through the tunnels under the castle. He thought of you running, quick as you’d always been and weaving through a crowd of soldiers. You had a way of being unnoticed.

But now, in the dark he knows for certain that you didn’t make it. He was caught while you might’ve been tortured. Might’ve frozen. Might’ve hoped he would come and find you. 

His thoughts have been, as of late, the most dangerous things. He forces himself not to picture how it happened. Not to ask about all the gory details. The terrible things that both did and did not happen to your body so long as he knows no specifics. 

All the while, you’re watching him like you’re sorry.

“You didn’t need to know that. It just slipped out, darling,” you sigh, “it didn’t hurt when it happened.”

That’s the only explanation he gets, but he can’t help but also assume from your pained eyes that it’s another side-stepping of the truth. He turns his hands inward again, searching for the sash.

“But you might live,” you try again.

“I doubt that very much,” he replies, “whatever Nilfgaard has planned, it necessitates me being alive. But only for now.”

“You’re brave,” you say, “and you’ve survived this long. Foolish people die out quickly, but you haven’t.” 

“I’m not,” he says. There is a laugh caught in his throat. It ends up sounding wrong, a little scary, even to his ears. “I am a coward, you could tell just by looking.”

Your hands are still on his face. No doubt you can feel that his cheeks are getting wet. But you don’t acknowledge any signs of breaking. Any creases or cracks are overlooked, you’ve always been good at that. But the weakness in him that makes him reach for a modified noose cannot be ignored.

“Try to live,” you say, “for the princess.” 

“Not for you?” though he knows it’s cruel to ask the dead something like that. You shake your head. Your warm fingers follow the curve of his cheekbone. 

“No, darling,” you say, he’s given the first reminder of your smile. Though it’s sadder than he remembers it being. “When death decides you’re ready, I’ll be right here.” 

The cell jostles around another turn, and Mousesack’s eyes fly open again. Your hands are gone, as is the rest of you. There is no loving, little face peering at him through the dark on the other side of his cell. There is no one who cares if he is cold or sick.


	2. Unbury

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> probably will end up writing more for my fave druid but for now?? he ain't dead, kids!

Strange, how a house can die.

You stick to the central room, exploring the empty beds and ghostlike stairway doesn’t interest you. And everywhere else is freezing cold, you’ll stay by the fire. By him, with his eyes that flutter occasionally with his faltering heartbeat. But they’ve yet to open. 

The black-and-gold army ran through this town like a crack in a mirror. A fracture, leaving it split and its citizens mostly dead. Fools, you think, waste of breath to kill them all. Hope they like ruling over dust.

Town square was warm for a few days while they burned the bodies. You hid with your own and a plus one in a shoddily-defended townhouse farthest from the sound of clanking armour. And you put your hands over his ears out of a half-crazed desire to keep him from hearing the odd scream. That’s no way to wake.

Now, you wouldn’t mind if he did. Though Mousesack’s chest rises and falls, he’s yet to join you. You have supper warming in a pot over a fire sunken into a pit in the floor. Dug it yourself. Pried up the splintering wood with a shovel so you’d have kindling without going outside.

The people who used to live here are dead. The skeleton of their home keeps you alive. Keeps him alive. It’s why you took the linens off the beds and piled them near to the hearth. It’s why you curl around him every night, praying you don’t wake up next to a cooling corpse.

—

His head pounds in his dreams, sometimes the sounds of the world he sleeps in are muffled. Other times, clear as day. He can feel someone next to him, sometimes, the sound of a familiar voice singing. 

Heaven’s right there, he can’t think but if he could he would think that. If he could just open his eyes, he would be there. 

Because he would very much like to look at something other than the inside of his eyelids. Or his cell. But no, they took him out of that. He traces the line of what happened after with hands that aren’t moving. 

Cell. Snow. Run. Monster. Him. Knife. In that order.

He wishes doubly that he would wake up, he doesn’t want to look at his own face sneering back through the dark.

Life toys with him for longer hours than he spent in the cell, it must. He can’t tell days or nights, but he isn’t so thirsty any more. But he still feels a little sick. A little shackled to his own frailty, as it was before.

It’s on the day he starts to shove back that he’s rewarded. It’s when he tries to push his eyes open, to lift his hand and call out that he begins to feel. His fingers twitch. He hears a gasp and a clatter and there is a body next to his own, a flesh palm knitting its fingers between his.

He’s so close, he can do it. Whoever’s talking seems to want him back. 

There is no magic, he still feels empty. But he pushes harder against sleep, against dying again and with a gasp of his own he lifts his head. He opens his eyes.

—

You think he might be having a seizure. Not enough blood getting to his brain. In the same breaths that you implore him to wake, you begin to cry. You’ve fought so hard, he even harder and now is not the time to die. Not so soon. 

But he shivers, shudders and shakes like a leaf. Mousesack’s cheeks gain a little colour and suddenly you’re not alone any more. He shoves himself forward, sitting up an inch or two with his wide eyes staring at the ceiling. Then, he falls back.

You hate to hover, to crowd but it’s all you can do. Ceiling be damed, you lean over him and catch his eye. You’re smiling, though crying with useless hands that don’t know where to touch. 

There was nothing in your short life as bleak as finding him in the snow. They, the man in the armour and the monster that changed into him, left Mousesack to bleed until he died. 

You were sure that he’d been stabbed near the spine when you pulled him away from the alley. It was more than dangerous to sneak him past the patrols, but you couldn’t risk him dying. Not while you waited for the army, of all things to leave. 

Moving him made you glad for the first and last time that he wasn’t awake. But his heartbeat was consistent, even if faint. Though you knew if that were to change that you had to try to help him anyway. 

The veins in his wrists snaking up to his forearms were tar-black with a sickness you didn’t understand. Some sore of magic-suppresser, an unnatural force that poisoned his blood through skin contact. But his hands were free, you didn’t need to break a set of shackles. 

You tore his gold doublet for bandages, the one he liked best. And all the while you only hoped you might hear him scold you for it. Just one more time, you wanted to hear his voice. 

To his credit, Mousesack seemed unwilling to die. The stab wound was deep but thin, scraping along 3his ribs but stopping just before it could sever the most dangerous artery. The stupid beast missed his heart by inches. 

You pushed on, felling his injuries shut so that the blood no longer oozed. You reminded yourself on more than one occasion that you were not the one to try to kill him, even if saving him might do him in. When you met him again, you imagined he’d call you a murderess, but you didn’t imagine he’d really mean it. 

—

You’re not a murderess. He’s lived, after all and stares at your face so near to his with a kind of relief. It’s done, it’s over. He’s made it somewhere else and now needs only to forget what he saw before he died. 

Hair still falls loose around your shoulders, as it did in the cell. It hides part of your face and though his hands shake, he lifts his arm to brush it behind your ear. You’re smiling at him, crying for him. He wonders how long you’ve been waiting. 

“Am I dead?” he asks this time. And that smile goes disbelieving. You laugh but it sounds like the sister of a sob. 

“No,” you say, “we’re both still alive.” 

Somehow, that hurts worse than the death he’s already come to appreciate. But that might just be the shocking pain that suddenly blooms in his chest. It’s caught up with him, the stab wound held together by a prayer and some string. His hand falls from your face to the source of the pain.

He’s forced to confront through the dull ache that whatever he saw in the dark of his cell wasn’t true. That whatever you’d said to comfort him didn’t come from your mouth. You rise, leaving him quickly to fetch some water. 

His intuition is poor, he realizes, to assume the very worst of your fate. He doesn’t know where he is, how he’s alive but you’ve managed it. Without magic or hope, you have. Still, he imagines there must be some truth to the great fear that clouded his mind after his capture. You look a sight better than him, lying with his chest thickly bandaged.

Your organs are still inside your belly. Your blood is still in your veins. Though you carry a bit of a limp as you move back to him, you’re unharmed but not unscathed. You sit beside him and brace a hand on the back of his head so he can drink. 

“We’re both very much still alive, I’m beginning to wonder if nothing will kill you,” you say. He thinks again to your hand on his cheek in what might’ve been a dream. You hold him more gently, despite all you say you’re still worried he might break.

“It was a doppler,” he says, more interested in water than the way your eyes widen. You’ll have to forgive him. Though you do intervene, taking the cup away so he won’t make himself sick. “It tried to kill me.”

“I know,” you reply, “I watched.”

“Oh,” he says. It’s unspoken but you understand enough about his silence, Mousesack wants to know what happened. 

“I saw a bit of everything, really. I didn’t want to leave the city without you, so I hid,” you start.

“I thought you would run,” he says, “I wanted you to run, you’re good at that.” 

“How could I?” you ask, heaving a sigh like the decision to abandon anyone would have been too difficult to make. “I stayed and just when I saw you—”

“The soldiers saw me, too,” Mousesack supplies after a beat of your sullen silence. 

“I followed them,” you say, “you’re right, I am very good at running and not being seen. I had to know where they were taking you.” 

“Is the army still here?” like the pain in his chest, he’s confronted with that sudden realization. He tenses and the stab wound doesn’t like it very much. 

“No,” you say, you put your hands to his shoulders to try and comfort. His eyes squeeze shut, regret evident. To think that he tried to sit up when he first woke. “They left soon after finding out that the princess wasn’t the princess.”

As you expect, it sends him into an even greater panic. Though you can admire him for this, at least. His love for his family knows neither end nor sleep. But you still keep your hands at his shoulders while you explain what the doppler was for.

You only heard snippets of screams, saw a girl in a blue cloak running across a snowy field. She was grabbed and taken inside. She never came out, but twin black knight’s did. 

“They have no idea where she is,” you explain to him, “and neither do you so you’ll stay very still even after I take my hands away. Won’t you?” 

He makes no promise, which you interpret to be a calculated decision. But when your hands do leave him, Mousesack stays put. To an extent he knows how foolish it would be to run off into the winter snow with no guide and a stab wound near his heart. His hands ball into fists.

“She isn’t dead, either?” he asks. You shake your head.

“I have no reason to believe so, no. The doppler would have had to see her to know how to change their shape. Isn’t that right?” it is. He nods and allows himself to relax against the pillow. His torn muscle and skin screams in protest to his readiness for action. 

“We have to leave,” he says, “to find her,” and to his great surprise, you nod.

“We do, you’re right. But you need time to heal—” you rush your words out like you’re expecting disagreement. The guilt of abandoning the princess does weight on him, but not enough to act foolish. 

“How much time?” he asks in the tone that’s most conducive to diplomacy. He trusts you. 

“In three days, your magic should return enough that you can sort out your own insides,” you reply, “I will keep you alive until then.”

“Just three days?” he asks.

“And no more, I swear. But you must lie still until then, can you do that for me?” you say. 

He’s no use to anyone wounded, but still his gut rebels against the idea of lying here. But the dull, empty thud of his magic that is still yet to return is what makes him agree. He’s worse than useless with no powers to speak of. 

You give a sigh of relief, similar to when he first woke up. You’ve been worried, for some time it seems that he might slip away from you. And not necessarily because death came for him. But he’s promised, now, that he won’t run in the middle of the night to find the girl he swore to protect. And his word still means something. 

—

The fight leaves you, then. The bottled-up insistence that he stay has nowhere to go, and in its wake you find yourself exhausted.

Mousesack will have to live with your request, though he’s far too old to be petulant about its result. You shift on the linens, lying down beside him now that you’ve gotten your way. You can’t remember the last time you made yourself comfortable next to him, it’s a feeling you’ve more than missed.

He stays still, knowing better than to attract your ire for the sake of intimacy. But you can feel his eyes on you, looking with loving hesitation. He did almost lose you, after all, just as much as lost him. 

Something’s troubling him, but you have no way of knowing the cause. You’ve both seen too much, more than anyone could ever be asked to walk away from. Asking him is not an option, how could you drag him again through whatever dark memories he’s collected?

You kiss him instead, which he gratefully accepts. You put your lips to his cheek, to the bridge of his nose. To his mouth, made rough and dry by the cold of winter. 

It’s different than the dizzy, flustered kisses stolen in an alcove a few feet away from a party in the great hall. It’s not like the time you took his hand and followed him away from the kitchens to his tower for the night.

You’re on the floor with him, in a dead house wearing clothes that do not belong to you. But you kiss him. You’re still in Cintra, it’s still summer. The castle is asleep around you. And you are safe.


End file.
